Jared Olar: Time to celebrate the Jewish and Christian overlap

Friday

Dec 23, 2011 at 12:01 AMDec 23, 2011 at 10:16 PM

For all the spiritual patrimony that Christianity and Judaism share, and despite their shared historical origins, relations between these two faiths for most of the past 2,000 years have been pretty poor.

Jared Olar

For all the spiritual patrimony that Christianity and Judaism share, and despite their shared historical origins, relations between these two faiths for most of the past 2,000 years have been pretty poor.

That painful and most regrettable history helps to explain why most Christians and Jews don’t know much about each other’s beliefs and traditions. Part of that ignorance is a lack of awareness that Hanukkah is part of Christians’ and Jews’ shared spiritual patrimony.

Probably, most Christians know that observant Jews do not celebrate Christmas. And, of course, Jews know that Christians don’t celebrate Hanukkah. I’d also wager that most Jews know why Christians celebrate Christmas, but most American Christians don’t know why Jews celebrate Hanukkah. In fact, I suspect quite a lot of Christians probably have no idea that Jesus celebrated Hanukkah (John 10:22).

I also suspect that few Christians or Jews are familiar enough with each other’s faiths to be able to see that Hanukkah and Christmas “overlap” in more ways than merely falling at around the same time of year.

More overlap: Christmas is Dec. 25, while Hanukkah begins on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev. Hanukkah lasts eight days, while Christmas also has an “octave,” an observance of eight days ending Jan. 1, the memorial of Christ’s circumcision. Also, although Christians don’t celebrate Hanukkah, Christian Bibles tell the story of Hanukkah (in Daniel and I & II Maccabees), and the martyrdom of the Holy Maccabees is marked in the traditional Christian calendar of saints on Aug. 1.

The symbolism of light has a prominent place in both holidays: Hanukkah’s lighting of the menorah, and the electric lights and Advent candles associated with Christmas. With both holidays falling near the winter solstice, when we have the least amount of daylight in the northern hemisphere, it’s probably inevitable that you’d have a lot of lighting of fires and candles when you celebrate a holiday at this time of year.

In fact, it’s not uncommon to hear the claim that Christmas and Hanukkah are just Christian and Jewish adaptations or co-optings of ancient pagan winter solstice festivals. Many even think that Christians decided to assign the date of Christ’s birth of Dec. 25 as a concession to newly converted pagans who had celebrated a solar festival on that day.

That makes sense at first glance, and some Christmas traditions are certainly “baptized” and appropriated formerly pagan customs. However, neither Hanukkah nor Christmas are or have ever been celebrations of the solstice. In fact, in the case of Hanukkah, the date of Kislev 25 was chosen not to appropriate a pagan tradition, but to blot out the black memory of a pagan assault on the Jewish faith — the pagans had defiled the Jewish Temple on that day, and three years later to the very day, the Maccabees liberated and rededicated the Temple.

The origin of the celebration of Christmas on Dec. 25 is not as clear, though. Christian tradition has identified Dec. 25 as Christ’s actual birthday since the third century, and without a doubt, Christians have celebrated Christmas on Dec. 25 since the fourth century. But it can’t be determined whether Jesus was really born on that day. Perhaps he was, and the pagan Dec. 25 festival was only a coincidence, or perhaps the date of Dec. 25 was “baptized” by the early Christians.

Or maybe the date of Christmas was influenced in part by Hanukkah. In II Maccabees, there is explicit language that links Hanukkah with Sukkot, the Jewish eight-day fall harvest Festival of Tabernacles, or booths. At the first Hanukkah, the Jews wanted to make up for the eight days of Sukkot that gentile persecution had stolen from them that year, so they “exported” various Sukkot customs to Hanukkah.

In Jewish tradition, the “sukkah” (booth or hut) represents the human body. Notably, St. John speaks of the incarnation as “the word was made flesh, and set up his tabernacle in our midst,” (John 1:14) and later St. Gregory of Nyssa says that Dec. 25 is “the true Feast of Tabernacles” in which “our tabernacles, which were struck down by death, are raised up again by him who built our dwelling from the beginning.”

Coincidence? Maybe — but I think it’s an inter-religious overlap that is worth celebrating.